Earth has been taken over by kindly aliens. After years of apparentlygood treatment, humans finally find out what the
aliens look like--the Devil. Great psychic societal shock.
It turns out that the ancient image of the Devil was a psychic hint to humans from
their deeper selves of something of the horror of what was to come in their
future.

During those years of rule, the aliens had been diligently searching for
examples of true human psychic ability. They only find a few. The human
protagonist (I believe he was the UN Secretary General) wonders why. At a
dinner party, an alien senses the presence of a true psychic power. It turns
out to be the unborn child of a pregnant guest. This is the boy you (me,
ed.) probably had in mind. When he turns ten (or thereabouts) psychic powers
spread like wildfire throughout the children of the world (apparently puberty
was the cut-off point). I don't think he willed it; apparently it was a
"natural" phenomenon. He probably was some sort of catalyst. In that
sense he wasn't at all like Jesus. His baby brother had power in spades. He
simply lay in his crib and used his power to provide for himself. His parents
don't have to care for him.

Around this time, the aliens take all the children away in spaceships to a
deserted continent (Australia?)
as a strangely powerful alien group mind enters orbit. There, the children
participate in the strange rites you remember, millions of them in some vast
group dance, guided by the more powerful alien mind, who apparently consider
the first aliens as some sort of servant race who help young psychic races ease
their way into their highest selves, undergoing a transition normally
considered too difficult to undertake unaided. The first aliens are trying to
explain this to the adult humans, but they themselves don't understand those
aliens much at all.

This dance is what I meant in the essay when I referred to the book as an
example of collectivist thought. I've told other SF fans that it could be
thought of as the ultimate dream of socialism. The adults are wholly
demoralized. They no longer have children. Most kill themselves. The rest die
of old age as the children dance.

Earlier, one human smuggled his way into the first alien species' spaceship
and experienced a bit of life with them on their world. Then he was returned to
Earth just in time for the cataclysmic ending. The children reach some sort of
emergence where they combine with the alien minds. In doing
so, they suck every bit of life out of the Earth, and turn the planet into
dust. The last human elected to stay on Earth as this happened. He
guessed he would die, but he didn't mind because everything he loved was gone.
The first aliens give him a radio and ask him to describe what he sees. They
want to learn more about the ways of their "masters." The human finds
the experience of being sucked up by the superior aliens amazing and
exhilarating, he's ecstatic until he dies.

Editor's note: To my knowledge, this book has not yet been filmed. It would
make a fascinating, if morbidly tantalizing, film. The ending reminds me of the
last movement of Vaugh Williams's Sixth Symphony. Is
this what we fought a Cold War to avoid? JWB

Apparently the 1997 cable film directed by Jeff Lipsky
has nothing to do with this novel (check imdb.com).

Ms. Morem also gave me and asked me to present
this essay on Amisov as a supplement to the review

Of Robots,
Empires and Pencils: The Worlds of Isaac Asimov Reconsidered

Reviewed by By Sally Morem

Human society is
the most astonishing and perplexing of all the universe's life-forming,
self-organizing processes in its ability to transform the creative and mundane
acts of thinking beings into systems that span the globe and stretch out into
space.

Isaac Asimov,as a writer and a man, was
vitally concerned with the workings of human societies. He dreamed of far-flung
interstellar empires run by fragile and misguided humans, with robots made in
their image, guiding them away from destruction. But, for all their imaginative
world building, Asimov's Foundation and Robots series of stories and novels
must be considered magnificent failures.

"Magnificent"
in the sense of the boldness with which Asimov described galactic civilization
without all the hackneyed, Buck Rogers slam-bang space fighting against
bug-eyed aliens.
"Failures" in the sense that a centralized galactic empire run by a
planet-bound bureaucracy and a future Earth wholly controlled by robotic minds
stretch believability to the breaking point and beyond. But, to be fair, let's
try to understand the literary strictures Asimov had to face as a young writer
in the SF genre of the 1940s.

Let's return to the
time when pulp fiction and Space opera ruled the magazine and bookstore racks,
when daring spacemen didn't hesitate to reach for their blasters when facing
strangers--either aliens or humans--and never failed to avoid the use of
subtlety in any given opportunity, a time when enormous galactic battles raged
on unabated for no apparent reason.

Doc Smith's Lens
men series was only the most famous of the "thud and blunder" school of SF writing. Interstellar war
was seen as an enlarged version of pirate battles on the high seas. War as fun and games, and not as the desperate struggle for the
survival of a people and a culture that it really is.

Instead of the
Empire of Force, held together by death rays and Lens men, Asimov was
attempting to craft an Empire of Reason. And not just that, but an Empire
guided by a Plan--which was, in fact, an elegant mathematical equation, one
which could accurately predict what trillions of human beings would be doing
for centuries. These stories were later collected in "Foundation,"
"Foundation and Empire," and "Second Foundation"--The Foundation
Trilogy.

And at the same
time, in a different series of stories, Asimov was bucking the hoary stereotype
of the malevolent robot. Susan Calvin, Robo
psychologist for U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., describes the
development of robots in the 21st century in "I, Robot," a collection
of these stories. Each robot has its own personality and faces its own rather
unusual challenge. Robbie, devoted nursemaid to a little girl; Speedy, torn
between self-preservation and obedience to a lawful order given by a human
being; Cutie, a would-be theologian with a truly unique view of the universe
and his place in it; Dave, who can't control his "fingers" during
emergencies; and Herbie, the mind-reading robot who
makes apromise he can't keep.

To guide the thoughts
and actions of his personable robots, Asimov sets up the Three Laws of
Robotics--

1. A robot may not
injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being tocome to harm.

2. A robot must
obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict
with the First Law.

3. A robot shall
protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the
First or Second Law.--and then, gleefully, proceeds to knock them down.

We discover that a
full understanding of the morals and ethics incorporated in the Three Laws is a
bit more elusive than a surface reading would indicate. Asimov's stories
demonstrate the "fuzzy logic" inherent in such words as
"harm," "protect," and "obey." These words seem
straightforward enough, but they're actually laden with semantic land mines
where the unwary step at their own peril. Asimov admitted that his Laws were
deliberately designed with not-so-obvious loopholes in order to create artistic
"wiggle room" for conflict needed to create interesting stories.

Asimov's short
stories and novels took the science fiction world by storm, and rightly so.
Here we have cute, lovable robots, sometimes brilliant, sometimes bumbling, but
always with a new slant on what it means to be "human." And here we
have, not a man of action, but a mathematician, a thinker, as hero. I speak of
none other than HariSeldon.
Seldon and a small group of psychologists developed a
psychological profile of the galactic masses, a science of statistics called
psychohistory which "deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to
fixed social and economic stimuli..."

Any ordinary
person, science fiction fan or not, would find such claims to be astonishingly
bold. How could anyone, no matter his intellectual achievements, have the
audacity to think he could envision the future history of trillions, let alone
assume he knew anything worth knowing about their present lives? This is enough
to do serious damage to thereader's ability to
suspend disbelief, a skill required for enjoying any kind of fiction,
especially science fiction. Asimov attempted to cover himself (and Seldon) by taking great pains to explain that
psycho-history was never applicable to individuals, that individuals were so
variable, so individual, that they were fundamentally unpredictable. "It
[the Plan] could not handle too many independent variables. He couldn't work
with individuals over any length of time; any more than you could apply the
kinetic theory of gases to single molecules. He works with mobs, populations of
whole planets, and only blind mobs who do not possess
foreknowledge of the results of their own actions. "Seldon
openly asks the Emperor and the 40 billion bureaucrats who manage the affairs
of the galaxy on the Imperial planet Trantor to
permit the formation of a Foundation, the purported purpose of which is to
collect scientific and technical data from around the galaxy and to publish it
in the form of a "Galactic Encyclopedia" every ten years. In the
meanwhile, he secretly works on his Plan. The professional historians and other
skilled employees of the Foundation, citizens of Terminus, the Foundation
planet, are maneuvered by Seldon's Plan into tight
spots as the old Empire falls apart, in which only one response would guarantee
their security, each such decision designed by Seldon
to cut the projected 30,000-year collapse of the Galactic Empire down to a mere
one thousand years. In this manner, the Foundation society figures out how to
use conflicts in trade, science, religion, and politics to secure a tenuous
foothold in the development of Seldon'sSecond Empire. And so, over centuries,
the Foundation and, in secret, the Second Foundation (the enforcer of the
Plan), built the Empire of Reason.

But here is where
we run into some serious conceptual difficulties. Even though the Foundation
Trilogy was Asimov's fictionalized plea for our leaders to rely on reason
instead of force to carry out their political agendas, no Empire, Earthbound or
Galactic, can ever be held together for any length of time by force or reason.
Any Empire worthy of the name is made up of innumerable rules, customs and
mores, crafted over the ages by those who didn't even know they were creating
them. Rough and ready rules of thumb were established by people for short-term
gain, with no intention whatsoever of enshrining them in institutions. Their
descendants followed these rules even though they had no idea why they existed.
Civilizations survive despite themselves. The legally blind leading the blind.
The Lawgiver imagined by Asimov is more myth than fact. Instead of the image of
the Lawgiver applying the stick of force and offering the carrot of reason to
recalcitrant followers, visualize trade routes, slowly growing in length,
complexity and volume. Visualize the merchants as they carry languages, art,
science and general know-how along with their physical cargo to ever more
remote areas of the world. Visualize trade becoming abstract, an
ever-increasingly complex ebb and flow of ideas, ratcheting cultural evolution
upwards into literally inconceivably dense networks of human interaction and
aggregation. Such spontaneous social orders are never commanded by any
Lawgiver, although monarchs, dictators, presidents, generals, and captains of
industry have presumed the existence of such control since human civilization
began. Here is one aspect of human society which is rarely considered in
political philosophy outside of ecological concerns: Population. Size really
does matter.

To illustrate this
point, let's start with a group of five people. Consider the novel
decision-making procedures, the growth in the potential number of relationships
and conflicts, the continual fissioning of
professions into specialties and sub-specialties, and the varied societal
structures as the number of individuals in our hypothetical group increases
several times by a factor of ten: A family of 5; A club or association of 50; A
corporation of 500; A town of 5,000; A city of 50,000; A metropolis of 500,000;
A province of 5,000,000; A nation of 50,000,000; A continent of 500,000,000; A
world of 5,000,000,000. Now, we could continue this progression by adding
zeroes until we have the numerical equivalents of a solar system civilization,
a federation of star systems, a galactic region, a galactic empire, and so on.
The differences in social structure increase in intensity as we do so. This
means the social structure of a galactic empire would no more resemble that of
the Roman
Empire
than a 20th century American city would resemble a Stone Age village. The potential
numbers of relationships and conflicts increase exponentially, resulting in
radical changes in the nature of mediating institutions in the given society
and in the society as a whole. We can see from this analysis that the societies
on our hypothetical list could not possess the same political organization,
technological capability, culture, or knowledge base. And yet, the Foundation
series reads as if it were the history of an Earth-bound empire. In fact,
Asimov admitted that he based his galactic empire on ideas borrowed from
Gibbons' "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

This is why the
story seems so overly simple, sound-textured. Each scene is written as if it were
taking place in a different city on Earth, rather than in what would be deeply
complex planetary societies in a galaxy-spanning civilization of nearly 25
million inhabited worlds. A key to understanding the fundamental problems in
Asimov's world-building can be found in the final story in "I,
Robot." Susan Calvin realizes that the Machines, as she calls them, have
taken over Earth. Robotic brains have evolved into behemoths which control
whole industries and nations. Not for evil purposes, as in "Colossus: The Forbin Project," but in order that they may fully
conform with the Three Laws. And so, in order to
protect humans from their own mistakes, the Machines have developed the ability
to detect and anticipate deviations from the explicit orders of the Machines
and correct for these deviations. "Every action by any executive which
does not follow the exact directions of the Machine he is working with becomes
part of the data for the next problem. The Machine, therefore, knows that the
executive has a certain tendency to disobey. It can incorporate that tendency
into data, --even quantitatively, that is judging exactly how much and in what
direction disobedience would occur. Its next answers would be just sufficiently
biased so that after the executive concerned disobeyed, it would have
automatically corrected those answers to optimal directions.

The Machine
knows...."Can you imagine how much information would have to be collected
and processed every hour, every minute, every second, in order to make such control
possible? I can't. As we move into the future, it seems events enfold us in a chaotic rush, which only afterward take on meaningful
patterns when we place them in context.

Asimov, however,
assumes that the onrushing events in human society can be understood by the
Machines long before they happen. We can understand better what is wrong with
that assumption by studying an essay which was first published just a few years
after the Foundation Trilogy, a small essay writtenfrom
the viewpoint of an ordinary pencil. Leonard Read's,
"I, Pencil," has since become a classic in the literature of the
science of economics. Read impresses the reader with the singular fact that
even though billions of pencils have been produced, not one person knows how to
make a pencil. Two interrelated questions immediately spring to mind.

One: Why are
pencils, supposedly such simple things, so difficult to make? And Two: How do
humans manage to make them at all if they are so difficult to make, let alone
in such prodigious numbers? Read answers the first question by describing
something of what goes into making a pencil: the production of saws, ropes,
trucks, and other gear needed to harvest the cedar tree out of which comes the
wood for the pencil; the fabrication of steel for the tools, growing of hemp
for the rope, construction of the logging camps, the beds, the mess hall, the
cookery, the raising of food, the shipping of logs, the construction of trains,
rails, engines, and so on; the millworks and all that is needed to run them;
and the kilns, the heat, light and power to run them in the pencil factory. And
we haven't even begun to examine the amount of work that goes into making the
pencil lead, paint, lacquer, metal brace and eraser! The answer to the second
question, the point Read tried to make, is that it takes an entire, very
complex industrial economy to produce a pencil (among millions of other
things). This ability is a kind of societal intelligence--an emergent function
of large aggregates of self-aware, self-interested, altruistic, interactive,
and very individualistic people. This ability may seem paradoxical, but is only
apparently so (out of many and one?) since the many and the one exist
simultaneously at different levels of organization. This ability cannot be forced,
commanded or ruled from the center. It can only Be.
The pencil explains, "Actually millions of human beings have had a hand in
my creation, not one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others...
each of these millions sees that he can exchange his tiny know-how for the
goods and services he needs or wants...millions of tiny bits of know-how
configuring naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and
desire and in the absence of any human master-minding.

"And if you
think pencil making is tough, consider the esoterica
that would be necessary for the construction and maintenance of spaceships,
robots, and space stations--to name but a few things needed to keep a galactic
empire functional. Consider the vast amount of raw material, human talent and
skill, and wide array of tools that would be required to develop asteroid
mining into a going concern, for example. Imagine a number which would express
this complexity. Now multiply that number by a
quadrillion megabytes. Not even the 40 billion busy bureaucrats of Trantor could manage such an avalanche of data.
Historically, as well as today, societal processes orchestrate the growing and
shipping of food and goods, the generation and allocation of energy, the
setting of political decision-making processes into motion, the construction of
intricate scientific theories out of thousands of ideas and observations, and
the communication of all this and more through ever-changing networks of
individual human beings.

Researchers in
chaos theory tell us that not only are the actions of individuals impossible to
predict, but that the future state of entire dynamic systems are also
impossible to know in advance.

Here is where the
world-building problems of the Foundation Trilogy and The Robots series
conjoin. Human societies cannot be grasped as wholes, let alone understood and
manipulated in the detail needed for Asimov's dreams of Robots and Empire to
come true. They can only be allowed to happen. Dynamic systems, such as
turbulence, weather, and societies are notoriously unstable. Scientists
describe them as "infinitely sensitive to initial conditions." This
means that if an initial description of the state of a system is off by even
less than a billionth of a percentage point, after a few cycles of calculation
the results will turn out to be totally different than those predicted. It does
not matter how wise or benevolent the Machines are, or how well thought-out Seldon's Plan is, the infinite variety of universal
processes will defeat the best intentions of would-be planners every time.
Human society is a new kind of self-organizing system. It is the first one we
know of formed by intelligent beings. This gives society as a whole the kind of
power no other complex chemical or biological system has. Perhaps we are at the
beginning of a new kind of evolutionary development, one that might lead to a
society that spans the globe, the solar system, or even the galaxy. If so, then
Asimov's dreams may come true, but in a manner he couldn't have foreseen. The
Foundation series and the Robots stories, along with Arthur C. Clarke's
"Childhood's End," will probably be remembered as the last great and
most eloquent arguments put forth for the idea of collectivism in the
literature of science fiction. But even as we re-read and enjoy them, we and
our descendants will plunge headlong, unguided, into the chaotic,
self-creating, evolving, no-promises land of the future--of society and the
free human mind.

Ó Copyright 1998 by Sally J. Morem. All Rights Reserved subject
to fair use. Reprinted on this web site with permission.

My own take on Childhood’s End:(and the movie “V”)

If I had a chance to work on a movie of this book, I would jump.
Particularly fascinating is several problems: (1) how society reacts to a
sudden change in its political order when imposed from without, even if
benevolent (the bird beings in the novel) – and I think of a comparison to the
1983 miniseries V (Warner Bros.,
dir. And wr. Kenneth
Johnson, 197 min) in which aliens take over suddenly and look like humans, but
we gradually find out that underneath they are reptilian (perhaps a takeoff on
rumors about the origins of the Basques) and a great underground overthrows
them.The point (2) here is the
fascination with the gifted child who marks the turning. I am reminded by
comparison with the Clark Kent character in Smallville. Point (3) is the
fascinating portrayal of another planet during a journey by one human guest –
all buildings with no streets. (Compare with the First Dominion in Clive
Barker’s Imajica).
The dance to death (a kind a bacchanal like in Saint-Saens’sSamson and Delilah) corresponds to
the sexual pleasure that sometimes can come in total submission, to the point
that one is willing to be altered or destroyed. This seems to be a moral
parable in that ultimate pleasure can lead to permanent destruction.

I don’t think a movie project for this book has been attempted. There is a
TV comedy by this name directed by Jeff Lipsky at imdb.comathttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115880/There is little information there and I
don’t think it’s related. I don’t see it on Netflix.
Maybe somebody knows.

Rendezvous with Rama
(Arthur C. Clarke, orig pub 1972, current 1990 Bantam
ISBN 0553287893) is a famous classic. A large object
(“Rama”) is detected approaching earth, and when explored it turns out to be a
large cylinder with a whole “model railroad” type world on the inner surface,
with its own geography and wonders. Gradually robots are discovered, and soon
the explorers come to an airlock door and have to face the alien source and
purpose of the craft.